


All Go and No Show

by mixedwithintellect



Series: Sign of the Times [3]
Category: Don't Let Me Go - Harry Styles (Song), Kiwi - Harry Styles (Song), Medicine - Harry Styles (Song), One Direction (Band), Sweet Creature - Harry Styles (Song)
Genre: 1960s, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-10
Updated: 2018-12-10
Packaged: 2019-09-15 20:46:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16940433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mixedwithintellect/pseuds/mixedwithintellect
Summary: the one where they're both artists and fell in love with a one-night standORThe 1960s installment of the Soul-Mates verse.





	All Go and No Show

“Where yeh goin?”  
  
His croaky voice was small compared to the vast expanse of the bed he was spread on, stretching miles to where you stood. The room was dark, greys growing vines up, down, against the shadows. The only sliver of light came from the bathroom, beneath the door you had gently opened to slip back through.  
  
Your dress was against your skin, clung to the areas where sweat hadn’t properly dried, catching onto the smell of sex that flooded against your pores. A vision you were not, but the tired ache against the small of your back kept you from caring much.  
  
Your fingers were working to slide your flats back on, when he had stirred. You hadn’t spent long in the restroom, granted, but the thickness of his speech when you’d risen from his sheets had led you to believe he’d be out like a light.  
  
“Don’t tend stick around, sorry.”  
  
He shuffled at that, his face peeking out from swarm of pillows and blankets. He had tucked away in the white plush, burrowing against the softness and feeling the mattress form securely around his weary self, fully expecting you to join him after. But now that your exit was more likely than jumping in for a snooze, his eyes were straining to be more awake, to be more present, to convince you to stay.  
  
It wasn’t your style.

* * *

The world was calling, in all its 1960s glory, and the night had become the Momentous Time to Live. It wouldn’t do, to spend it curled next to a man, when the roads were slick and your coin purse was light. The need for more adventure was itchy against your elbows, but scratching at it did nothing to ease it away. You were ready to go, ready to see what else the world had set out for you, after spending a portion of it with the sweet boy with the guitar and the way with words.  
  
Harry Styles.  
  
He was a musician, the sappy type, the type who believed in his words and in his love. Those men were the most dangerous; your mother had said. The kind who knew the game and how to play were fun, but the ones who believed in the hushed words when hips met and moans hit throats - those were the ones who would hurt or get hurt. Neither appealed to you, so you strayed from them, set on making it big with your pen and paper. Like Jack Kerouac, you’d make it for yourself and no one else.  
  
He had found you after his set, his eyes gleaming with a wisp of something smoked.  
  
“Yeh sit pretty,” he’d admitted, crashing upon the barstool to your left. It didn’t seem altogether planned, a startled hand slamming on the counter to straighten himself out, but you didn’t mind. He was a character, perhaps, cloaked in an awkward boy’s guise. Your fingers strained for a pen, but the only one was behind the barkeeper’s ear.  
  
“Could write forever ‘bout it, I think,” he had said, and while you swirled a straw around a glass and plotted how to steal the pen, Harry’s compliments fluttered about your ears and gradually down your tongue.  
  
An hour later, and his arm had found its way around your shoulders , remaining even when the next act went on and the crowd went crazy and his hips swayed a touch around his seat and you could sense he was desperate to dance. But you weren’t a dancing sort, preferring to stay near the counter. Harry had even found a word for it, saying you ‘lurked’ and how funny he thought it was for the most beautiful girl to not have the lights dazzling against her cheeks.  
  
His words must’ve not meant much, despite the digs in his cheeks proclaiming over and over that the words were slick with fruits, honeys, sugars.  
  
“D’you not want a taste?”  
  
It felt warm, against your chest, where his fingertips gently draped against the bare of your arm, down to your core. It was warm and Harry was staring.  
  
“A taste?” Now, you heard, with the faintest hint of satisfaction, how his breath was lost from his voice, dissipated into the reds on the walls.  
  
“How’d you know I’m sweet if you haven’t tried?” Your head bent forward a touch, resting on the palm of your hand, leaning back from Harry, but not moving your other arm so he knew it was okay to stay. If your words were true (and they felt more true as his eyes grew wider) you wouldn’t want him to move at all.  
  
He coughed, and when his mouth opened, the voice was deeper. A faux assurance, perhaps.  
  
“Yeh wanna bail?”  
  
Okay, so you could deal with him moving, as long as it was to a bed.  
  
“To go where?” The place had been clearing for the last few minutes, people drifting to their corners of the universe, their faces having sweated off and their shirts wrinkled. It was the mildew sense of night, when staying in one place felt wrong but you’d have to have a plan of sorts of where to go next. Harry had the right idea.  
  
“My room?” he asked. The lights in the world burned brighter when he smiled, a pinkness matching his cheeks and you wanted to taste tungsten.  
  
The walk to his hotel was quick and without much fanfare, the pair of you stumbling down streets and passing women on the corners, their red lipsticks pouted and their cigarettes aflame.  
  
The elevator was the place between you and salvation, its wood paneling edged by a metal that provided a reflection of you two that wasn’t quite right. The warped glint showed an awfully large man behind you, his forehead extending on yards and yards, and between breathless laughter you had explained to him what it was.  
  
He peered in towards the metal, responding with a prompt, “Love, dunno what the fuss is about, yeh’ve got no head if I turn my face like this--”  
  
You’d knock him lightly on the shoulder, the clacks of your heels resounding off the tile flooring as he broke away. He seemed less intense, a man in an elevator, his guitar tucked away in his manager’s car. (“She’s gotta get her rest, y’know” he’d whisper against your cheek, as the pair of you were twisting out of the bar’s grasps into the air).  
  
Harry must’ve pushed a number as you were caught up by the metal’s reflection, because the doors had shut and the elevator pulled up and he pulled you close, a soft stumbling between feet that rightened itself out in due time. His hand covered the extent of your back, holding you there, keeping you.  
  
“If something changes, it’s okay,” he murmured, and his lips bit gently between your neck and shoulder. Your eyes closed as his tongue moved against your skin, it was a promise that meant nothing, and you found sympathy in this.  
  
You nodded, but sincerely knew that nothing would change. You wanted him, as if it ran in your blood and echoed in your ears. This was yours.  
  
The elevator was moving too slow, the numbers ticking up reflecting your growing inability to remain calm. His fingers were where they should be, pressed against your body, but not in the right spaces. Spaces that extended out into caverns with him not being there, so you took the matter into your own hands.  
  
Your fingers, clumsy in trial and error, found their way to the soft sheen of his shirt. Slipping through buttons until a good span of his chest was visible, they dipped below the fabric and brushed against his sides. Harry tightened around you in response.  
  
“Looking for somethin’ in particular?” his breath hitched as he spoke, his eyes were closed and his nose met your neck. His lips catching the taste of you again and again. You nodded but your hands didn’t roam from his chest, his abs clenching beneath the skin, goosebumps prickling up where his nerves had kicked in. It was a tease and you knew it.  
  
“Lower, go lower.”  
  
Ding.  
  
Your fingers retreated as the doors opened, but Harry’s head went to rest on your shoulder.  
  
“C’mon, let’s move on now,” you nudged him towards the hallway, and he breathed deep. It was slow, it felt slow, you became slow.  
  
Slowly down the rugs, towards his door with his sleepy eyes – no, they were weighed with passion, weighed with heavy feelings and heavy slowness and for a glimpse, you saw a morose blue but then it was gone and he wasn’t sad, no, nothing was tragic. You didn’t know why you felt it was, in a delirious fashion when his fingers trailed down and between your folds, when he opened his mouth a bit as he concentrated, when you leaned forward to kiss at his bottom lip.  
  
Nothing was tragic when your hands wracked through his curls, feeling for more than what there were, wondering why something felt missing but you were so full. So, unbearably full and his breath panting in your ear stuttered and groaned and you were moaning back, slow. Slow and deep and he left a smatter of marks around your chest. Slow, purple, soft.  
  
“Yeh don’t wanna wait ‘til morning, at least? Could make breakfast, sorta good with toast.”  
He sat up, a small boy surrounded by his comforter and your chest felt tight. Nothing about him was special but everything felt real, and the contradictions in your lungs weren’t proper. Not proper for a writer, not real enough for a Kerouac writer to be caught into. It was folly, it was foolish, it would cost you everything and a kidney to manage your way out if you stuck around. Not when the road was calling and you were finally on it.  
  
With a shake of your head, a gentle smile to hopefully persuade his frown to lessen, you stepped around his disarrayed clothes to the door.  
  
Halfway towards the elevator, you felt an arm on your shoulder.  
  
Spinning around, he was there. Shirtless, pants with half its belt looped around his hips, and no shoes on his feet.   
  
“I would really like yeh to stay.” He tried again, stubborn, nothing forceful in his tone but a simple longing in his eyes.  
  
“Got a bus to catch.”  
  
“I’ll catch it too.”  
  
Your fingers hit the button, the light glowing warm and Harry’s eyes shot to it. He was angled towards you, his shoulders bent forward a touch, his arm fallen to the crook of your elbow, fingertips gently moving along your skin. A delicate shudder rippled through your body.  
  
A pair, the two of you, entered the elevator, swiftly gliding through the air. You faced the doors as they closed, his arm secured around your waist, as if the pair of you were descending into something greater than a destiny forever.  
  
He couldn’t do it. You knew it, and perhaps he didn’t yet, but the musician within him would struggle to find solace in the dust-ridden roads and the blood that caked in your fingers -- whether it was a metaphor or not -- and you would rather see him gone by choice, rather than life’s nastiness.  
  
So when you pivoted to land your hands against his chest, his eyebrows shot up in surprise. Not having expected you to move forward, not anticipating your mouth against his chest this time, not realizing your hand had snaked down and tucked against his waist-band.  
  
“Fuck,” he whispered, lurching forward in a sway.  
  
“Want you,” the words stumbled thick against your lips but the grace was in the way Harry leaned back to look you, a confused but hopeful smile.  
  
“Right here?”  
  
You nodded.  
  
This time was different. You felt it and in the way he brought you tighter to him, but more softly, than before, he felt it as well. While there were instincts within you to stay, the logical part of your brain spoke to how he was an artist of major proportions and flings had no business growing beyond their gates. You were a writer - get two artists together and the separation would be ten million times harder than if you two had just stayed where you were supposed to.  
  
Skin on skin, but it was love. Love in the way he kissed you, hands on your cheeks and pressing you into him, molding you into his heart and you could feel the beat, feel it with your hands that rose up to cup his jaw, to sweetly kiss him both hello and goodbye.   
  
It was love, but it was over. The elevator doors had shut when you two had begun, and in the midst of it all, the button had been pressed (Harry had snapped up, a grunt low in his throat and a hand molding fingerprints into your waist and your hand had shot out to the wall, nudging buttons and Fate led the way).  
  
Somehow, in the midst of it all, it seemed Harry no longer believed he was going on the bus, either. You both knew, with one heightened look at the other, that this wasn’t proper. He had his tour, you had your novel. Nothing was meant to break that apart, it couldn’t possibly be worth it.  
  
You didn’t look behind you as you left. If you had, you might’ve fallen back a few steps at the vision of Harry, stood shirtless, with his pants half-up over the front, the words please stay on the tip of his tongue.  
  
Instead, you took onto the road, dashing through towns with outlandish skyscrapers and cars honking their lives out on the deep streets. The mountains greeted you like old friends and your papers became more and more filled with an epic you’d always envied in the papers, of true stories that you felt in your bones and stacked up as evidence in your backpack.  
  
And if you heard a sweet, slow voice playing out of the radio of your new friend Nick’s car (he promised you a ride to Michigan, so long as you told him stories on the way), you paid it no mind.  
  
_We haven’t spoken since you went away._  
  
It was a reality you had to live with.


End file.
